The Sophisticated man's shitlord

Monthly Archives: May 2018

So in other news this week, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has made a controversial statement about reproductive marxism, or as he referred to it “enforced monogamy” [1]. From what I could gather from the statement, the simple premise is that which I outlined in my essay on reproductive marxism.

In nature, it appears that the natural order mating opportunities flow to men much in the same way that capital does in capitalism. It flows from those who are unsuccessful to those who are successful, and the more capital a person has, the more capital will flow to them. A man who is unsuccessful in the mating market will be left with very little, if anything at all. A man who is successful in the mating market will receive even more mating opportunities.

However, this creates instability in the system in the same way that the above average collection of wealth among a small number of highly successful businessmen creates instability in a capitalist system. The fundamental order of capitalism is competition, as constant competition ensures that resources are efficiently allocated. However, the goal of any capitalist businessman is to gain a monopoly position where the maximum amount of revenue can be generated and where above average profits will be attained. Once an oligopoly or a monopoly comes to exist, resources will no longer be efficiently allocated. Reproductive Marxism

In any system that is a zero-sum or appears to be zero-sum, a side-effect is that the outcomes are often winner takes all, rather than being normally distributed. What this means is that wealth is distributed on a curve where the top 2 – 3% of the population control a great majority of the resources, rather than the resources being distributed roughly according to population size. It’s a fancy way of saying the top 1% control 99% of the resources, the bottom 99% control 1% of the resources. This tends to create a lot of instability within the system.

If one were to use the framework of conflict theory, one could posit that within a society one has a myriad of groups that all have different interests, some of these are deeply invested in the present social order because this social order benefits them in terms of resources. Other groups are in conflict with the present social order because it does not benefit them in terms of resources. For instance, the core argument made by Occupy Wall Street protesters was that the present system benefits at the top 1% at the cost of the 99%, economically speaking.

Much of Dr. Peterson’s work, from “12 Rules for Life“, to “Maps of Meaning” deals with the balance between mechanisms that enhance and preserve stability, and those that reduce and destroy stability. I’ve themed this the conflict between the ID and the Super-ego in Freudian terms. Where the ID, cast in Peterson’s analysis as chaos represents the natural order of things, and the super-ego order, the civilizing effect of reason on nature.

The article that somewhat inspired me to do some research, and subsequently write this essay, was a very effective piece of rhetoric, very accurately aimed at the market the author sought to influence, out of which my favorite quote is:

The idea that women will only sleep with the top men if given the chance is straight out of pick-up artist garbage pseudoscience. This ideology of “beta” and “alpha” males (the latter getting all the sex) is based on a mangled and since-retracted study about wolves, and bears no relationship whatsoever to human societies. Worse, it instills the false notion that women are largely status-obsessed sluts who will have to be basically coerced into sleeping with anyone but the most attractive men. [2]

Fortunately, yours truly cares quite little for rhetoric, I much prefer data, so what does the data say? In God We Trust, everyone else has to bring the data. In the quoted paragraphs there are 2 concrete statements we can look at.

A) The existence of Alpha males and Beta males as defined by sexual success.

B) The principle that women would rather share an alpha than own a beta.

From these, we can form a couple of hypotheses. In the case of the first statement, it’s quite simple, the basic premise is that a minority of men have a majority of the sex. This is often shorthanded as the “sexual market pareto principle” that Chris Rock verbalized as “20% of the men do 80% of the fucking“. If this is not the case, one would expect male sexual success to follow a normal distribution meaning that you have extreme outliers on both sides, and most men are somewhere around the mean. This means, simply put, that one would expect 33% of men to have less than the average of sex partners, 33% would have the average number of sex partners, and 33% would have an over-average amount of sex partners.

For the second statement, that women are and I quote “largely status-obsessedsluts” this is quite an easy set of hypotheses that would follow from the former two. In effect, if one falsifies the null hypothesis, and thus is capable of concluding that sexual success among men does not follow a normal distribution, and instead that a minority of men have a majority of the sexual success (as measured by sex partners) then one can establish not that women are status-obsessed sluts, because that would be concluding on a single cause, but that there is a sexual disparity among men, and thus that factors in female sexual selection behavior likely plays a part creating this sexual disparity. Thus, the following are the hypotheses for this essay:

Null Hypothesis: Attention from women to men follows a normal distribution

Hypothesis 1: Attention from women to men does not follow a normal distribution

Null Hypothesis: Sexual success among men follows a normal distribution

Hypothesis 2: Sexual success among men does not follow a normal distribution

It’s been a while since I wrote a Gendernomics essay of this type, but it seemed to be the perfect follow-up to the essays on pro-social vs. anti-social dominance hierarchies I wrote a while ago.

Perhaps the change that has the most impact when moving from a hunter-gatherer existence to one based in agriculture is the simple fact that agriculture generates a surplus. A hunter-gatherer tribe generates roughly the amount of value in a year that they consume, whereas with agriculture a group of farmers can generate much more value than they consume in the same period. Once you move from an agrarian society to an industrial one, the ability to generate such a surplus increases.

From a simplified macro-economic perspective, the reason for this is quite simple. A hunter-gatherer tribe has little left over for positive investment, they create enough value to feed themselves, and cover replacement investment (fixing their weapons, clothing and equipment) but they do not generate enough to improve their ability to produce. An agrarian society generates enough value to feed themselves, clothe themselves and invest in things that expands their capacity to produce. An industrial society generates enough to cover their basic needs and invest greatly in productive capacities with leftover resources for excess consumption.

Utilizing the simplified C-I-S model for a nation, where C stands for consumption, I for Investment and S for Saving, we could argue that theoretically for a hunter-gatherer tribe 90% of their generated value goes to consumption, and 10% to investment. For an agrarian group, perhaps 75% goes to consumption, 15% to investment and 10% to saving, and for an industrial population 50% is consumed, 35% invested and 15% saved. These are not empirical numbers, but serve to symbolize the development of human economics.

Gross investment is composed of net investment which is spending that increases the availability of fixed capital goods, means of production and goods inventories. For instance, buying a new building, new machine or increasing your inventory of products, and replacement investment which is replacement of depreciated capital goods. As an example, buying a new house is increasing the availability of fixed capital goods, maintaining that house over its lifetime is a case of replacement investment, as you are fixing the wear and tear of use.

One of the key elements is that if investment falls below replacement investment levels, then the ability of a group to produce goods and services goes down. Put very simply, if a two man carpentry crew has 2 hammers, and break 1 hammer a year on average, but do not make enough money to replace that hammer, their productivity will decrease.

I keep getting a bit of a backlog of essays on here as of late, because I have a planned posting schedule, that I interrupt on occasion when I get inspired to write something else that I think should be pushed out right away. In this case, I was sitting around on twitter thinking about a twitter thread I wanted to do, on how someone needs to make a TV show in the style of “The Most Evil Men in History” called “The Most Basic Bitches in History“. However, before I could compose that thread, this old statement I heard from Christopher Hitchens popped into my mind, I’m not sure if he was quoting someone, but the statement goes something like

“Which is more likely, that the whole natural order was suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie?”

I was unsure of why this statement stuck in my head, but over the course of a few days it became very clear to me. I wrote a long series on women with narcissistic, borderline and anti-social personality disorder a while back. This series was largely fueled by my own experience with such women, but also the experience of other men with whom I’ve spoken about their experiences.

A major characteristic of people who suffer from these disorders is to create alternate realities into which they draw their targets. Bernie Madoff drew his investors into an alternative reality he created, in which they were making massive returns on their investments. The trappings of his lifestyle, his behavior, the flying monkeys that surrounded him, and indeed many professional journalists reinforced this reality, so should a person develop doubt, they would question their own powers of observation, rather than the reality Mr. Madoff created. This could be explained as industrial-strength gas lighting.

Charlie Manson, of whom I spoke in “Of Lobsters and Serial Murder” did much the same thing, he created an alternate reality for his following, in which they were the bastion of hope for humanity’s salvation in the coming cataclysm that existed only within his mind, and as a collective delusion among them. Any opposition his group faced was explained through this paradigm.

This is very advanced frame game, where not only is the person in control of the frame capable of maintaining frame control, this is not that impressive of a feat. It’s much more impressive that they were capable of creating a frame in which every action, word or deed that contradicted their frame would be interpreted by their targets as being within the frame, thus re-inforcing it.

They construct such strong frames by creating narratives that stretch much beyond a normal frame. To exemplify this, the classic “chase frame” is a move in which a man flips the script on a woman he is pursing and frames the interaction as if the woman is pursuing him. A Manson level version of this frame would being able to maintain a frame around the woman, where she interprets every other woman as pursuing the man, regardless of what is really happening, and every action any person takes is taken as confirming and re-enforcing this frame.

This would not only build a reality in her mind where she is chasing him, it would also be built-in dread game and social proof, meaning that if he was aware of her being in this frame of mind, merely smiling at the cashier could have massive second and third order consequences. Continue reading →

This is in no means an extensive and exhaustive review or introduction into how one goes about conducting research. It’s a rather quick overview of the various steps taken when conducting research, and how one can utilize and apply the conclusions of such research when forming one’s own view of a subject.

A while ago Illimitable Man wrote a great essay entitled “Critical Thinking & The Citation Needed Fallacy” in which he explored the question of whether one can justify holding a particular view on a subject without peer-reviewed academic studies to support it. This was without a doubt born from the realization that to most people, a well-reasoned, and researched empirical observation explored through logic is no longer admissible in discourse without academic studies to back it up, studies which are in turn dismissed for a variety of reasons.

This came to to me while I was watching a youtube video that can be summarized as “If one has none of the symptoms of low testosterone, in fact one’s physical manifestations indicate high testosterone, yet one’s blood test shows low testosterone values, does one have low testosterone?”

In this case, one has two contradictory observations. On one hand, if a man is carrying a lot of muscle mass, has a ton of energy, a high libido, no signs of depression and low body fat percentage, plus is performing very well in athletics, these are the antithesis of the symptoms for low testosterone. On the other hand we have an empirical observation using a quantitative, positivist method, interpreted according to the optimum range or reference range. Do we put this person on TRT or not?

One of my major areas of focus is in self-improvement. Every year around my birthday I sit down with a tumbler of good scotch and close the books on the preceding year. This means that I’ll look at where I was last year, look at where I am now, and use that to make decisions about there I want to be next year. This is in essence breaking down the “past, present and future” paradigm into smaller chunks that can be measured. A major principle I tend to adhere to is the old statement by management guru Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed“, now some things are very difficult to create metrics for such as level of confidence, anxiety or depression. Other things are very suited for measurements such as number of workouts, lifting progress in volume or intensity, sleep, diet and many others.

One reason of the reasons why I implement such metrics is simply because it keeps me accountable and I find that I do better if I schedule and plan things out in advance. It’s very easy to fall into “I’m tired today, I’ll get to the gym tomorrow“, “I should do some work, but I had a 14 hour day yesterday” and similar traps. If you’ve got everything planned out and made into habits, you will feel antsy if you don’t do them. However, the major reason why I track and measure things that I think are important in my life is that if you are not tracking your journey from point A to point Z, how do you know when you’ve arrived at point Z? How do you know if you are off track, or even heading in the wrong direction? You don’t.

I’ve named this essay, the mathematics of self improvement, because I’m going to be talking about the various mathematical principles that many people misunderstand when it comes to improving their life as a whole or parts of their life. Continue reading →